{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2265",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 2265,
    "subject": "Blake",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-05-19T19:17:46+00:00",
    "last": "2000-05-19T19:17:46+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0029-0022@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Daniel Fusch",
        "address": "dfusch at hotmail.com"
      },
      "date": "2000-05-19T19:17:46+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Blake",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "That's interesting; I hadn't thought about connections between Wolfe and \nBlake.\n\nThe most obvious link, I think, would be Blake's \"desire of raising other \nmen into perception of the infinite\" (from his Marriage of Heaven and Hell). \n\"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as \nit is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things \nthro' narrow chinks of his cavern.\" Also, from \"Auguries of Innocence\":\n\nTo see a World in a grain of Sand\nOr a Heav'n in a Wild Flower\nHold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand\nAnd Eternity in an Hour.\n\nAlso, again from Marriage of Heaven and Hell: \"For every thing that lives is \nholy.\"\n\nThis perspective is what Severian achieves as he walks along the beach of \nthe ocean in The Citadel of the Autarch. He sees through the material into \nthe infinite, \"the doors of perception are cleansed,\" he sees that the \nentire beach is holy and has been dropped from the hand of the Infinite, and \nhe tosses away his boots that he might not walk shod on holy ground.\n\nThe other tenets of William Blake's vision are:\n\n1) The Standard of Energy (see Northrop Frye's book \"Fearful Symmetry\" and \nMartin Price's essay \"Blake's Standard of Energy\") -- \"Energy is Eternal \nDelight\" / \"Exuberance is Beauty\"; the energetic, passionate, unrestrained \nare good, while the passive, limited, and confined is harmful. \"The cistern \ncontains / The fountain overflows.\" Also: \"Sooner murder an infant in its \ncradle than nurse unacted desires.\"\n\n2) Wisdom can not be defined or expressed by one mode, one art form, one \nlaw, or one perspective. (This later becomes a tenet of modernism.) Thus, \n\"One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression\" and \"Everything possible to be \nbelieved is an image of truth.\"\n\n3) The observation of truth is achieved through a constant dialectic. \n\"Without Contraries is no Progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and \nEnergy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.\"\n\n4) \"All deities reside in the human breast\"; divinity consists of the \n\"Poetic Genius,\" or the transcendent, divine inspiration and \nprophetic/poetic vision of humanity. The Poetic Genius cleanses the doors of \nperception and sees eternity; the Poetic Genius alone can frame the \"fearful \nsymmetry\" of the Tyger in Blake's \"Tyger, Tyger\" by framing it within a \npoem. (By writing a poem--especially a poem that begins and ends with the \nsame stanza--the Poetic Genius frames the suffering of the world and allows \nus to see it, draw meaning from it, etc.)\n\n\nDaniel"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}